Terrorism and Globalism

Olavo de Carvalho
Zero Hora (Porto Alegre), September 08, 2002

For more than a decade leftist intellectuals placed in Escola Superior de Guerra and in military academies have tried to sell to officers of our armed forces the theory that, with the fall of USSR and the end of Communism, the world became unipolar and the only pole, with its growing ambition of world dominance, is the virtual enemy against which strategic plans of national defense should be turned.

Cowed by insistent campaigns of journalistic slander that accuse them of the worst crimes, and by the creation of a Ministry of the Defense that excludes them from ministerial meetings, and by budgets cuts that reduce the armed forces to impotence, and by the proliferation of NGOs for Indians and environmental causes that exclude military vigilance over growing portions of Amazon territory etc. etc., many officers tend to accept that theory, which allows them to see, behind so many humiliations they suffer, the figure of one villain: American imperialism.

From such assumptions, the reaction of the Bush administration to the September 11 attacks would be another step in the escalation of American imperialism that puts the world in danger and, naturally, Brazil. To give more credibility to that "conspiracy theory", the latest editorial of "Ombro a Ombro", the newspaper of the military distributed among thousands of Brazilian officers, even rehashes the old jargon of the anti-American campaigns at the time of the Vietnam war, dividing those at the top in Washington between "doves", that want to submit American belligerence to the control of the UN, and the "hawks", that don't accept any limitation, and want to rule the world. The conclusion drawn from it is obvious: that national defense should enter into alliance with "doves", giving support to multinational forces which, from Cuba to China and to the European Economic Community and Mr. Yasser Arafat, want to cut the wings of the "hawks". The conclusion is so coherent with the assumptions that it is almost imposes itself automatically. There is only one problem: the assumptions are false.

(1) There is no unipolar world . There is, on one side, the US-Israel alliance and, on the other, the block of the leftist globalism, entrenched in the UN. In a military sense, the bastions of the last are China--involved in growing nuclear preparation on the scale of global war--, Russia (that, under the cover, never ceased helping terrorists in the whole world), some Arab countries strongly armed and, last but not least, the worldwide net of narco-terrorist organizations; economically, the European Economic Community, without whose support Arafat's thrusts against Israel would have already ceased for lack of fuel; and in the political and publicity fields, the grand international leftist media (including the main American newspapers), that crucifies George W. Bush daily.

(2) The US are not a reverse Soviet Union, a totalitarian right wing state apt to formulate long term strategic plans that continue to be followed faithfully through generations, but a democracy, whose foreign policy changes water to wine at each new presidential election.

(3) All the imperialistic pressures that would have been behind the humiliation of our armed forces came during the government of the most innocent of the "doves", Mr. Bill Clinton, and not the "hawk" George W. Bush.

(4) Mr. Clinton, at the same time he was exercising those pressures on us and on many other countries, cut the strength, the budget, the fleet and the nuclear resources of the armed forces of his own country, blocked investigation about the infiltration of Arab terrorists, seriously weakened the CIA and FBI and, in short, did exactly the reverse of what it would be logical in an imperialistic escalation. Also: elected with the help of Chinese campaign funds, he also vetoed investigations against Chinese nuclear espionage in Los Alamos and did the devil to transfer the control of the Panama Canal, to China, a strategic zone. Finally, after September 11, he stuck to the rhetoric of the international left that threw, on the victim, blame for the attacks and demanded that the US, instead of exercising its right of defense, consented in becoming a mere auxiliary force of UN. What the hell of Yankee imperialist is he? Viewed, therefore, as signs of Washington's imperial ambition, the anti-Brazilian pressures of the Clinton administration make no sense at all. Viewed as maneuvers to play Brazil against the US and to strengthen the other pole of global dominance, they make all the sense in the world.

(5) The press campaigns against our armed forces--parallel to the beatification of terrorists of the 1970s --have always come from leftist journalists who, in international politics, join ranks with that second pole, against the US.

(6) Our military were not only disarmed materially and morally. They were disarmed intellectually: the suppression of studies of "revolutionary war" from the required subjects at military academies left two generations of army officers completely unprepared to act in a picture of continental revolutionary violence, today more intense and vaster than in the 1970s. The present President of the Republic is today the same enthusiastic follower of presidential candidate who, at meetings of the Forum of São Paulo, from 1990 to 2001, signed successive solidarity pacts with Latin-Americans terrorist organizations.

(7) The NGOs that infest our Amazon, withhold it from the watch of the armed forces, most with no roots in the US, but in European countries and the UN, that is to say: at the other imperialistic pole, of anti-American globalism (which, it is clear, has the support of Mr. Clinton and remaining doves in the US.

Of those observations, one can only conclude that our armed forces, and especially the new generations of officers, are the target of a vast and persistent disinformation and manipulation effort, to turn them into docile instruments of organized anti-Americanism, of the continental revolution and of the leftist globalist pole. Today, the four leftist candidates announce flattering promises to end two decades of humiliation, to restore the dignity of our armed forces. But can there be dignity in one who let himself be sold cheaply to same who did so much to knock down his price?